Leading Animal Health Company

Situation

Sales Incentive Calculation Engine & Field Reporting for a leading animal health organization. The deployed system with automated one-click processing along with integrated data transformation driven by parameterized web-based interfaces to drive monthly calculations.

a) The clients’ sales operations team faced significant challenges with the leading SPM solution (used primarily in the pharmaceutical industry) that they were using for a couple of years: 

• Significant manual touchpoints were required as  the existing solution was not able to handle plan complexities
• Data was required to be collected manually from source systems and required significant manual transformation before they could be fed to the system for calculations
• Several components were not implemented due to complexity and were calculated outside the system manually
• The entire processing timeline of 2 weeks was very long with very high involvement from the key client stakeholders  
• The entire change management process was tedious and took a long time before the actual rollout 
• The entire payment approval process was managed offline with the significant back-and-forth between the sales operations team and approvers
• The entire plan change process was tedious with no access to analytics and plan modeling ecosystem

b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives while providing them the capability to manage their process in-house without needing external consultants to do the same. They were looking for an ideal partner who can deliver agility & responsiveness, data pull from their internal data sources, provide flexibility to manage complex plan types and performance measures,  and an easy to use  platform that they can manage in-house. Their primary objectives were:

• Reacts, adapts, and enables faster system rollout for intermediate ad-hoc plan changes
• Ingest data automatically and transform it to system-desired formats with the click of a button without any manual intervention
• Support implementation of a variety of plan types and complex multi-step portfolio calculations to come up with final earnings
• Access and enable relevant functionality as client needs change based on evolving business requirements
• Configure plan acknowledgment and multi-level payment approval workflows to avoid manual back and forth
• Deploys integrated sales incentive platform with quarterly change management support
• High levels of automation and repeatability, enable them to focus on the actual business, not the incentives systems

Approach

Aurochs team did a comprehensive POC for one of the complex roles and matched results with their existing system. This allowed the client to gain confidence in our solution capabilities. After the implementation started, we spent time upfront understanding all their data sources, raw data formats, and plan design. The entire implementation was completed within 3 weeks in line with the new year plan rollout:

Incentive Platforms Rollout

• Data from heterogeneous sources are collected, collated, sanitized, ingested, and transformed in an automated manner with the click of a button using our proprietary Data Manager
• Aurochs Incentive Manager was configured to account for complex calculations such as portfolio level qualifiers, multipliers, etc. In addition, the eligibility manager was configured to account for various scenarios related to new hire status, transfer, leaves, etc.
• Parameterized web interfaces were designed to drive ongoing sales incentive calculations
• Enabled one-click processing from data load to reporting
•  Easy-to-use interfaces were configured to manage any change parameters during ongoing operations
•  Plan change & financial impact modeling were made available to evaluate the performance of upcoming changes using historical data
• Analytics and visualizations were made available to evaluate plan performance and effectiveness
• Designed & deployed field incentive performance scorecards and detailed Admin calculation reports using Aurochs Field Reporting Manager
• IPAD friendly reports armed with what-if calculators
  

Governance Structure

• Configured the platform and did detailed UAT with the client
• Weekly meetings were scheduled to assess the direction & progress of the project
• A comprehensive dashboard was designed to track the progress of implementation, discuss risks, and any requested changes
• Detailed SOPs were created and shared to manage ongoing operations seamlessly
• A monthly meeting was scheduled to answer any queries related to the monthly operation 
• A quarterly meeting was scheduled to discuss upcoming plan changes

Outcome

Key Outcomes:

The entire implementation process was completed within 3 weeks and a detailed UAT was done before the system rollout. Some key performance outcomes were:

• Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 50%
• Much faster total processing time of <15 minutes as compared to hours earlier
• Time involvement for operations from key client personnel was reduced significantly by more than 80%
• Improved alignment and engagement of the salesforce by giving them access to their monthly incentive progress reports along with what-if calculators to nudge them toward better performance outcomes 
• Change management time was reduced by over 75% and the majority of changes were deployed in less than a day